>>13086934The Abrahamic religions’ statements about the physical world are incorrect, but this is not their point. The point of these religions is to explain that it is possible to act in a way that is not in accordance with a narrow definition of self-interest, but in a way that is mindful of a larger community and it’s goals.
This is clarified if you make it precise with the notions of superrationality, and the ordinals of mathematics. The concept of the Church-Kleene ordinal and the concept of superrational behavior explain that when you act you should act as if there was an all-knowing entity who knows what everyone wants and knows everything about everything, and that this entity then tells you what to do.
Because the only way to have any clue of what this entity wants is to painstakingly reconstruct what the best behavior is in collectives, you need to look at history, and experience, and you need to summarize this thinking in texts. The religious texts just do the best job they could do at the time, given the political constraints around them.
Since we are having this conversation over wires, and since all of us have a scientific and mathematical maturity today that those people would salivate at, we can do better. But the main idea is not garbage, it’s just “act as if God is telling you what to do, where God is defined as a perfect logician who knows what everyone wants, has an idea of the collective goals of all the humans together and tells everyone else what to do too”. The basic law of the religious texts is that those who act this way have an advantage over very long time scales over those who don’t, and this prediction is historically true, and is a self-consistent justification of the idea.
